From ancient redwoods, a fresh water supply

Mesa Water District engineer Phil Lauri shows at left the amber tint of 87,000-year-old groundwater colored by an ancient redwood forest. The clear bottle at right is the same water after filtering and treatment at the improved Costa Mesa facility, which now uses 100% local water with out any imports.JEBB HARRIS, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Take the last remnants of an ancient redwood forest, add water; then, tens of thousands of years later, separate the two of them again.

That, in essence, is the recipe Orange County's Mesa Water District is using to break away from the pack and pump 100 percent local groundwater to its customers' taps.

The district is purifying redwood-tinted water the color of “weak tea” from hundreds of feet down. And it recently announced a milestone: weaning itself off directly imported supplies completely, at least for now.

That is a rarity for Orange County water providers, who rely on a strictly controlled mix of groundwater, which is augmented with imported water pumped into the aquifer, and direct imports from pipelines.

“This is probably the most significant achievement in the history of Mesa Water,” the district board's president, James Fisler, said during a recent tour of the district's water works.

Mesa Water's secret is a system of tightly rolled filtration tubes, which squeeze water tinted amber by the ancient, buried redwoods – water otherwise thought unusable – back to crystal clarity.

Time and nature took care of the first steps in the brewing process. One hundred thousand years ago, redwoods lined what would one day become the Orange County coast.

Climate shifted, floodplains formed, and the former forest was buried beneath layer upon layer of sediment.

Water filtered through, merging with the water released by the trees themselves.

Over the past 87,000 years, the water has dissolved the redwood remnants, which left behind nothing but their color.

Enter Mesa Water. In 2010, district officials reached an unusual agreement with the Orange County Water District, the managers of the deep aquifer beneath north and central O.C.

They would be permitted to draw as much water as they could pull from the redwood-tinted portion of the aquifer, about 600 to 1,000 feet down.

Water producers, including Mesa Water, are normally limited to a maximum of about 68 percent of the basin's clear groundwater. However that's expected to rise to 75 percent by 2015 as the Orange County Water District expands its production of purified wastewater that is added to the drinking-water aquifer.

The agreement was reached, in part, because Mesa Water is providing a kind of secondary benefit to others who draw from the aquifer. Pulling up the tinted water keeps it from spreading into the broader aquifer and becoming a treatment problem at nearby wells.

Drinking the tinted water would not be harmful; Mesa Water board member Fred Bockmiller drinks it himself at meetings to make the point.

But we've come to expect the water in our taps to be clear. Anything else is a non-starter.

For decades, that left an untapped resource in a corner of the aquifer.

Mesa has now begun conducting tours of its filtration site, though the district, like many others since 9/11, has increased security to discourage water terrorism. Tours are by appointment only.

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Mesa Water District engineer Phil Lauri shows at left the amber tint of 87,000-year-old groundwater colored by an ancient redwood forest. The clear bottle at right is the same water after filtering and treatment at the improved Costa Mesa facility, which now uses 100% local water with out any imports. JEBB HARRIS, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Engineer Eric Owens at the Mesa Water District's Mesa Water Reliability Facility demonstrates how membranes in a filter cartridge trap natural organic materials, which tint groundwater. The white portion is the color of the filter without the amber tint that the groundwater carries from an ancient redwood forest. JEBB HARRIS, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
The amber tint of 87,000-year-old groundwater at left was colored by an ancient redwood forest. The clear bottle at right is the same water after filtering and treatment. In the 1930s the tinted water was served in amber glasses in Orange County health spas, in the belief it had healthful properties. JEBB HARRIS, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Managers tour recent improvements at the Mesa Water District's Mesa Water Reliability Facility on Wednesday March 6, 2013. The filter cartridges at right remove the natural organic materials from the water. JEBB HARRIS, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Barry Carlson of the Mesa Water District shows off a new redwood forest at the Costa Mesa Facility. Recent improvements have allowed the Mesa Water District to use 100% local water with out any imports by removing the tint from 87,000-year-old groundwater colored amber by an ancient redwood forest. JEBB HARRIS, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Barry Carlson and Stacy Taylor of the Mesa Water District walk through the multiple ecological plant zones on the grounds of the Mesa Water Reliability Facility in Costa Mesa. The garden aims to represent the relationship between plants and the groundwater system in Orange County. JEBB HARRIS, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Chuck Reed prepares to place a new sign at the Mesa Water District's redwood forest at the Mesa Water Reliability Facility in Costa Mesa. JEBB HARRIS, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Chuck Reed and Del Goodwin prepare to place a new sign at the Mesa Water District's Mesa Water Reliability Facility. JEBB HARRIS, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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